Brenternet (The World as seen by Brent Moore)

Trying to appeal to the highest common denominator. I can't give you 110% effort, but I will give you 107.4% effort. If you're a spammer and leave me a comment, I will make fun of you. I use twice as many semicolons compared to most other bloggers

About Me

As the title implies, I am Brent K. Moore. I married MariLynn Simons on Sept. 25, 1999. we attend Stewart's Creek Church of Christ. We have five pets, a dachshund, Slinkie, a malamute, Juno, and three rabbits, Ebunny and Ifurry, and now Houdini.

Monday, January 02, 2017

Brent's 2016 Self-aggrandizement Photography post

Back with probably no demand whatsoever, it has become my yearly tradition early in the year to look back at all of my photos and crunch the numbers to see how everything did. In years past, I've written all the boring stat stuff first. This year, I'll show the year's top photos first and then you can skip over the boring numbers at the end.

Brent's top 10 photos of 2016:

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go in no particular order:

Tex's World Famous BarBQ - Nashville, TN
Every Day, Flickr has a formula to pick the top 500 photos uploaded that day. Those select photos belong to "Explore" and when a photo makes it, it gets several hundred extra views plus a few extra likes. I spent a couple of days at my company's downtown office, and one day on the drive home I found this old neon sign which got me into Explore.

Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q neon sign - Decatur, AL
My second photo to make Flickr's Explore was also a neon sign of a BarBQ restaurant.

Pulpit Rock - Berlin, TN
As I scour the entire mid-state looking for places to photograph, I love to find the off the beaten path places. It's even better if it used to be a very important spot, but now nobody knows it's there anymore. There may be no better example that this rock in a very small town park.

The most noteworthy event in my home of Smyrna this year was the plane crash of Blue Angels pilot Jeff Kuss. In honor if Kuss, the Davidson County Courthouse in downtown Nashville colored it's lights in Blue Angels Blue and Yellow. I was outside dealing with a thunderstorm to get this photo.

My family got Nashville Zoo passes this year. I was fortunate to show up a couple of days after the Gibbon mother and Son went out on public display.

Good lightning shots can be difficult, but this one was a photo highlight of our family beachfront vacation to Panama City Beach.

My third photo to reach Flickr's explore was also a neon sign. This one was a laundromat in Huntsville. Neon signs did very well for me this year, especially on Pinterest.

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile
This one was a fulfillment of an item on my bucket list, more than it was a great photo. This iconic and elusive vehicle made a stop at Franklin's 4th of July celebration

Davidson County Courthouse Old and New
The county courthouse in Nashville makes a second appearance on this list. At the beginning of the year, I upgraded my camera equipment with a real wide angle lens. This view would not have been possible without one. With my previous lens, I could not entirely fit the building on the left in one frame.

This last one is certainly more important to me than it would mean to anyone else. In January it was a beautiful day when the NHL All-star game festivities came to downtown Nashville. I had a fun day even though there was a mob of people. At the same time, something about this photo clicked with me and I now see sunlight reflecting off windows in a different way.

Other 2016 accomplishments:

In 2016, I was finally published in National Geographic! I have often thought of them as the pinnacle of photography. But, did they use my best photo? No, they used a silly photo in a kid's book about famous fails. I guess I need to go actually find that book now.

As it turns out, my other photo to appear in a book was also a children's book. The other one was a book about Major League Baseball star Nelson Cruz. I took a photo of him as a minor-leaguer who came to visit the Nashville Sounds. It must have been the cheapest photo they could find so they wanted to use it.

Now that the best photos are out of the way, what can Brent bore everyone with?

This may be the part where you stop reading. I am a professional number cruncher, so this kind of thing is my cup of tea and probably not yours. I record it for posterity sake.

In 2016, I took more than 18,500 photos. About 17,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 9,259 of which about 370 were uploaded in 2016. These photos have been viewed collectively 10,304,620 times. During 2013, Flickr changed what's considered a "view" making more things count than what used to. As a number cruncher, this irritates me, so 1.5 million views in 2016 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 6,028, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 15,200 unique visitors who made 24,933 visits viewing a total of 112,2651 page views with 546,486 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 13.01 GB of bandwidth. 46% of visitors used Windows which is going down a little every year. 47% people browsed with Chrome and 2 people used the old-fashioned text-based Lynx browser. I set up a Facebook account which now has 75 followers and a twitter feed with 65 followers. These were set up as a set-it-and-forget-it tools that re-post my other content, but still has room for growth.

In 2015, I set up a Pinterest page which for the most part pins my popular flickr photos. I also have a couple of boards where I pin my favorite photos taken by others, so this is going to skew the data of my original content. Pinterest tells me I have 855 pins on 15 boards. My most popular pin was the Acme Feed & Seed neon sign which has 72 repins.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 270,334 page views in 6 years, with about 42,000 in 2016. I wish I could find the page where Google lists the searches people typed in to find me. Mostly, so I could look at the weird ones. Yesterday, one person typed in "olive pit allergy" and got to my site.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups, but nothing really uploaded in 2016. All-time, I have 629,894 views with 27,341 in 2016. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 37,693 views all-time but only about 100 in 2015. A new stat they offer: In 2016, My videos have been watched for 31,300 minutes. The most watched video is a recording of "Salvation has been Brought Down" recorded at the Diana Singing.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Move Just One Match to Fix the Equation

Monday, January 04, 2016

Brent's 2015 Self-aggrandizement Photography post

Back with probably no demand whatsoever, it has become my yearly tradition early in the year to look back at all of my photos and crunch the numbers to see how everything did. Before looking at any of the numbers, I am going to guess that everything is way down. In 2014, I took off a couple of months as I dealt with the health of my family. While that was still the case in 2015, it was more spread out.

In years past, I've written all the boring stat stuff first. This year, I'll show the year's top photos first and then you can skip over the boring numbers at the end.

Brent's top 10 photos of 2015:

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go in no particular order:

Opryland Hotel Christmas 2015: Guitar D
A photo I took three weeks ago has been distinguished as my most viewed and favorited photo of the year. I never know which pictures will make Filckr's explore for most popular photos, but this one did. I published four different suspended guitar pictures from the Opryland Hotel Conservatory. This was my least favorite one, but the one that others liked. It's now my 32nd most popular, 3rd most liked and 199th most viewed photo of all time.

Cades Cove: Cable Grist Mill
As a family, we went to the Gatlinburg area for a Valentine's Day weekend trip. After all these years of photography, I finally had a chance to see Cades Cove which is the most visited part of the most visited National Park in the country.

Eldorado Motel - Nashville, TN
If you follow my photos, you know I love old neon signs. After spending the last decade driving all around my home town, I thought I had already found every historic neon sign I was ever going to find. Well, these days I can't get out and take photos as often as I used to, which means I need to accomplish more on the days I do get out. I had been meaning to do this for years, but in 2015 I put together a spreadsheet of everything in Tennessee I'd like to photograph, making a list of over 1,000 different places. During my research, I found a brochure for the Civil Rights tour of Nashville. That's where I found out about this fantastic sign for a motel that was recently demolished. It seems like few other people are aware of it. I couldn't go wait to see it, and I did on a day with beautiful weather when the sun was hitting it right.

Cummins Station - Nashville, TN
Located next door to Union station, I have wondered for years how to get a good view of this photo of this place. Finally, I figured it out. A month later, a local company paid me to display this photo in their lobby.

Lindsley Avenue Church of Christ - Nashville, TN
I've driven past this interesting church building many times, never sure how I'd be able to get a good view of it. On this particular day, the sun was just right and no traffic was around.

Conway Twitty Mansion - Hendersonville, TN

CN IC #9613 Locomotive at the Memphis Pyramid
I like trains, but I am partial to train companies I don't see as often. I've got a lot of photos of CSX trains. It took my third trip to Memphis to see a CN train for the first time. And, I could not have picked a better backdrop. I suppose there are plenty of people out there tired of CN trains who would love to see a CSX.

W.C. Crawford General Store - Williston, TN
As I was making my list of 1,000 places to visit, I came across this cute general store, one of the nicest I have seen. It's also in the middle of nowhere, so I had to drive a while to get there.

On a family vacation to Florida, I saw this Snowy Egret. As I west to see how close I could get to it, the bird let me get closer and closer and closer until I was up in it's business.

I had heard that the town of Huntsville, AL was built near a spring. On the day I was in town, I walked all around the town square and surrounding buildings. Then I went to check out the park with the spring. I had no idea the spring was so massive, or that there would be a rock bluff so high. It seems to me that this should be a more prominent tourist destination. The town really is built around the spring as there is a historic bank building on top of the bluff. The town added the fountain and Koi into the pond.

Other 2015 accomplishments:

This photo made it into the opening credits of a TV show, so that it would be seen in every episode. Sadly, Battle Creek was cancelled into the first season.

On the same day Battle Creek first aired, the John Oliver Show used my photo of cloggers.

I made it into the Washington Post. Well, sort of. When the controversy of Nathan Bedford Forrest was at its peak, a Journalist for that paper wanted to use this photo. The photo editor overruled the author and went with a stock photo. Still I was quoted and it was along the lines of "a local blogger says the statue of Forrest is making a facial expression as if he is sitting on a thumb tack."

I sold this photo of a Siamang to a zoo in New Zealand. Along with Europe, I am now published on three continents.

Now that the best photos are out of the way, what can Brent bore everyone with?

This may be the part where you stop reading. I am a professional number cruncher, so this kind of thing is my cup of tea and probably not yours. I record it for posterity sake.

In 2015, I took more than 14,700 photos. That may sound like a lot and it's more than last year, but it's about half of what I've done other years. About 13,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 8,885 of which about 400 were uploaded in 2014. These photos have been viewed collectively 8,853,768 times. During 2013, Flickr changed what's considered a "view" making more things count than what used to. As a number cruncher, this irritates me, so 2.5 million views in 2015 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 4,975, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 16,407 unique visitors who made 26,031 visits viewing a total of 217,901 page views with 643,357 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 23.71 GB of bandwidth. 56% of visitors used Windows which is going down a little every year. 42% people browsed with Chrome and 3 people used the old-fashioned text-based Lynx browser. My desire is for the website to grow exponentially, and the more content that gets added, the more visits I should get every year. The goal is for the ads on the site to start paying off someday as well as the increased exposure causing me to be the first person found when looking for a stock photo of a specific place. I set up a Facebook account which now has 71 followers and a twitter feed with 53 followers. These were set up as a set-it-and-forget-it tools that re-post my other content, but still has room for growth.

In 2015, I set up a Pinterest page which for the most part reposts my favorite flickr photos. I also have a couple of boards where I pin my favorite photos taken by others, so this is going to skew the data of my original content. Pinterest tells me I have 792 pins on 15 boards. 11,586 saw these pins in 2015 with 142 repins. My most popular pin was of a Muscovy duck.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 228,532 page views in 6 years, with about 44,000 in 2015. I even had hits from Taiwan. I wish I could find the page where Google lists the searches people typed in to find me. Mostly, so I could look at the weird ones. Yesterday, one person typed in "Balloon Darts Knoxville" and got to my site.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups. All-time, I have 583,630 views with 33,337 in 2015. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 37,693 views all-time but only about 100 in 2015. A new stat they offer: In 2014, My videos have been watched for 37,895 minutes. The most watched video is a recording of "Salvation has been Brought Down" recorded at the Diana Singing.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

This month is moneybags

Thursday, January 01, 2015

Brent's 2014 Self-aggrandizement Photography post

It has become my yearly tradition on the first day of the year to look back at all of my photos and crunch the numbers to see how everything did. Before looking at any of the numbers, I am going to guess that everything is way down. There were two big reasons I didn't accomplish as much this year. The good reason is my son was born in Feb and that takes much of my time. The bad reason was several of my family members got really sick and spent much time in the hospital. Everything turned out ok, but it ate up a lot of my time.

In years past, I've written all the boring stat stuff first. This year, I'll show the year's top photos first and then you can skip over the boring numbers at the end.

Brent's top 10 photos of 2014

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go:

The Cheatham County Bicentennial Trail Bridge became my all-time top rated photo ever! It has 13,150 views and 119 favorites. That's 30 more favorites than my second best photo.

The Limestone Quarry Cave & Lake was a spot on my to do list for years. Located in the small Tennessee town of Erin, I had known about this place for years, but only discovered where it was located in January. It would be high on my list of cool places that most people don't know about. And the water looks really blue.

Early morning at the River Confluence. If you wake up really early, you can get some river photos before the fog dissipates.

Sometimes, I think derelict places can be interesting, such as this Cumberland River ferry which has been abandoned for over 20 years

The Blue Angels came to town this year. While I did not go to the air show this year, I was able to setup and watch them practice on a sunny day.

This was at a national veterans cemetery during Memorial Day weekend.

This Rock City barn is in Christian County, KY

MariLynn and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by going to the Mile Long Yard Sale in Watertown, TN. As it turns out, the old Broadway Dinner Train was there, too.

I usually don't try to go out and photograph the top tourist destinations because everyone tries to photograph it as well. Unless I can put my own unique view on it, I sometimes don't even try. With that, MariLynn spent nearly two months in the hospital this year, and much of it was at Centennial Medical Center seen on the left side. I'll say that I did find a rare view of the Parthenon this year.

Now that the best photos are out of the way, what can you bore everyone with?

This may be the part where you stop reading. I am a professional number cruncher, so this kind of thing is my cup of tea and probably not yours. I record it for posterity sake.

In 2014, I took more than 13,000 photos. That may sound like a lot and it's more than last year, but it's about half of what I've done other years. about 12,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 8,523 of which about 500 were uploaded in 2014. These photos have been viewed collectively 6,322,505 times. During 2013, Flickr changed what's considered a "view" making more things count than what used to. As a number cruncher, this irritates me, so 2.5 million views in 2014 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,00 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 3708, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 19,268 unique visitors who made 44,117 visits viewing a total of 171,565 page views with 488,336 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 11.99 GB of bandwidth. The most popular time to visit is on Sundays. 573 visitors stayed for over an hour. (I suppose these are my biggest fans.) 57% of visitors used Windows whereas three people browsed there from a Wii! 37% people browsed with Chrome and 3 people used the old-fashioned text-based Lynx browser. My desire is for the website to grow exponentially, and the more content that gets added, the more visits I should get every year. The goal is for the ads on the site to start paying off someday as well as the increased exposure causing me to be the first person found when looking for a stock photo of a specific place. I set up a Facebook account which now has 53 fans and a twitter feed with 41 followers. These were set up as a set-it-and-forget-it tools that re-post my other content, but still has room for growth.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. After five years, the hit counter says I've had 55,873 visitors with over 9500 of those were in 2014. I am retiring that counter in 2015 and going with Blogger's count of page views. Blogger reports I had 184,795 page views in 5 years, with about 41,000 in 2014. I even had 18 hits from Taiwan.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups. All-time, I have 568,758 views with about 57,000 in 2012. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 37,588 views all-time. A new stat they offer: In 2014, My videos have been watched for 42,834 minutes.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Demand Account Letter! Oh, Noes!

Just when I thought we had paid every last bill from my wife's two month hospital stay, we get this letter...

(Please take a moment to open this up and look at it at full size. )

Oh Noes! What can I do? What if I start getting calls from debt collectors?

I guess I'm going to have to send them a check for $0.00!

[Side note: The ironic thing is this office sent two different doctors to look at my wife while she was in the ICU and these two doctors strongly disagreed with each other regarding the best course of action. To be fair, she received excellent care from everyone involved.]

Friday, January 03, 2014

Brent's Favorite Songs in 2013

I guess I shouldn't expect that anybody other than my closest friends care what I think, but these are the songs I listened to the most in 2013. I'm not a music critic or reviewer, but I do listen to a lot of music. I just won't be able to put into words what I like about songs. I also listed to a lot of Acappella church music, and that is also beyond the scope of this list. These songs aren't in any particular order.

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Brent's 2013 Self-aggrandizement Photography post

In years past, I've written all the boring stat stuff first. This year, I'll show the year's top photos first and then you can skip over the boring numbers at the end.

Brent's top 20 photos of 2013

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go:

Martin Springs
As someone who loves photos, it would make sense that one of my favorite things to collect is post cards. I began to find many 70+ year old post cards to this place and upon further research I found this amazing natural wonder was a must see tourist attraction in the 1930s. This year I asked around and I didn't have a single friend who had ever heard of this place. Even crazier, I bet half of my friends had driven within a quarter mile of this place, and it's still open to the public and easily accessible. My mind was preoccupied with this place until a sunny spring day when I took the day off work just to come out here. I may never do it, but someday I want to write a book on all of the hidden gems in and around the area, just like this one.

CSX 5318 Crosses the Nickajack Lake Causeway
Perhaps I over-rate this photo, but this was the first photo where I was able to take advantage of the super-super zoom of my Canon SX40, which I purchased to supplement my nicer dSLR. I could not have gotten this photo with my more expensive camera. Plus, I just think it's cool how you have lake, tracks, lake and mountains, plus some vapors.

Tri-State Spot in the News: Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama
This isn't the most exciting photo, but what it lacks in pizazz, it makes up for it in news-worthiness. (And, I didn't even realize it at the time!) All of this made for my favorite photo write-up of the year.

Tennessee Mountain Highway - Marion County
There's not much I can say about this one, I just like the curvy mountain road

The Delta Queen at Night - Chattanooga
A few photos back, I talked about my Canon SX40. I take photos where I push my limits of my camera all the time. Here, I specifically wanted to do it with my "lesser" point-and-shoot and I left in the car my camera which was better equipped for this kind of thing. Sadly, this was also the last time I was able to do this as when I was photographing the waterfall two photos down, I dropped the SX40 in the stream and I broke it for good.

The Full Moon Rises over the Cumberland Plateau
Every once in a while, you see something that you've never seen before and wonder if it's really that rare. For those of you that don't know your astronomy, the moon is full when it's on the other side of the Earth from the Sun. So, when we get close to the longest day of the year, both the sun and the full moon can be in the sky at the same time, but on different sides of the sky. The setting sun produces a warm glow at a time of day we photographers call the Golden Hour. On a clear day at dusk, the sky can be a color that I can only think to describe as "Mixed Berry Yogurt." While the execution here isn't perfect, I don't know if I'll ever be in a position to see this again.

Wetumpka Falls - near Ledford Mill
Yes, this was the waterfall that killed my backup camera Canon SX40. But, if I had left while pouting instead of taking some photos with my good camera, I would have missed out on photos like this. It's what the SX40 would have wanted.

Fentress County Courthouse Reflection Upon US Flag in Store Window - Jamestown, TN
This was an artistic idea that jumped out at me. It made me wonder why I don't think to do this kind of thing more often.

Union Camp Falls
There's a running joke around photographers. "That's a great photo. I bet you have an expensive camera." We hear it all the time. Yet, nobody ever goes to a restaurant and says "That was a great meal. I bet you have an expensive oven." See, you have to know how to use it. With that in mind, this photo was taken actually after sunset.

Steam Train Panning - Southern #630 at TVRM Railfest 2013
Until the 2013 Railfest, I had never seen a steam train in action, or at least not during my adult photography years. I didn't ride the train since I was there to photograph it. I planned my whole day around where I would be when it was coming and going, looking for the best staging locations. However, when the train returned to the station from it's excursion, I didn't know where to be as I ended up changing my spot several times. I ended up too close for what I was hoping to accomplish. Instead, I got this action shot which turned out to be my favorite of the day.

Coffee County Fair 2013: Astro Wheel at dusk
The next few were taken at the county fair in Manchester. I like blurred motion photos of ferris wheels, especially classic ones such as the 1967 Astro Wheel.

2013 Coffee Co. Fair: Astro Wheel in the Day
Not to get too technical here, but one of the camera toys I had this year was a variable neutral density filter. An ND filter help you blur the motion of something that would normally not be that way. I wanted to blur the motion of a ferris wheel in the daytime since it's something I'd never seen anyone try before. While I liked this result, this still image while using the filter is the one to me which really popped! The colors are vibrant and I like how the sky is dark to light across the sky. (This happened because a variable ND filter is really two stacked linear polarizers, which can cause weird things.)

2013 Coffee Co. Fair: Spider Ride
Most people only try to get blurred motion pics of the wheels, but I think the other rides can certainly provide interesting and colorful results.

DeSoto Falls
This may have been my riskiest photo of the year as I'm leaning quite a bit past the guard rail. However, there's just no way to get a better photo unless you know someone who lives on the other side of the gorge.

The Tivoli Theater - Chattanooga, TN
I finally had a chance to get a picture of this spectacular marquee lit up at dusk. I wasn't really fully in a legal place to park, so I had to set up and get out in about a minute.

Christ Church Episcopal - Rugby, TN
This year, I accomplished several places off of my Tennessee bucket list. One of the places I looked forward to the most was the quaint little town of Rugby. The community has preserved about a dozen Victorian era buildings and this colorful church is the most popular. It was built by Cornelius Onderdonk and I just like that name.

Hamptons of Skullbone, TN
Sometimes the towns on my Tennessee bucket list consist of one intersection and one store. This store has quite a bit of character and charm, plus a neat story. And, I got there in the morning so the sun was hitting it perfect.

Reelfoot Lake in Autumn
I learned about Reelfoot Lake in my 4th grade Tennessee geography class and it took me nearly 25 years to get out there. Sadly, I was only able to stay about an hour but I loved my time there. Much of what I know about photography is self-taught, often by looking at someone else's picture that I love and figuring out how they did it. For this photo, I held the camera about an inch above the water to make the nearby water in the foreground extra blurred, conveying a greater sense of depth.

Greyhound Half Way Station - Jackson, TN
The subject of many images from my photostream is nostalgia, although rarely do any of these places outside of Nashville have any personal meaning to me before I photograph them. This is a rare exception. Growing up, my family would spend every Christmas in the Dallas suburbs to be with my grandmother. In the Christmas of 1986, the rest of my family took the car because they were able to get away sooner leaving my dad and I needing alternate transportation when my school break came up. For the first (and so far only) time I traveled by bus alongside my dad. We departed downtown Nashville late and made a scheduled stop here close to midnight. This is also the only place I've ever used a Pay Toilet.

Perry Co. Courthouse at Night - Linden, TN
This photo is a combination of two of my recent photo objectives. 1) Take great photos of every county courthouse in Middle Tennessee. 2) Take photos just after sunset when the sky is colorful. With #1, my aim is to become the go to source for small town mid Tennessee stock photo needs. Getting a great picture of each county courthouse is crucial in that regard. While some courthouses are ornate, others were built at a time when counties were cutting back on spending for their public buildings. This makes it a challenge to find something that stands out when the building itself is more plain. On #2, I used to think that the photo opportunities dry up when the sun goes down. That's true for a lot of places, but there are still things we can do at night. Even better is a few minutes after sundown when there's still color in the sky. If I ever get to produce a coffee table book, it will probably be on courthouses in Middle Tennessee and this photo would be in there.

So What was my most popular photo in 2013?

Flickr has a term called interestingness where they use a secret formula to determine what my most interesting photo is. My photo of the abandoned train station in Jamestown, TN really took off. The photo has 66 Favorites and 5,900 views. This photo became so popular, it leapfrogged all my other most popular photos to become my all-time best. This saddens me just a bit, not that there's anything wrong with this photo, but I'm just not sure I want this to define my career.

Now that you have the best photos out of the way, what can you bore everyone with?

This may be the part where you stop reading. I am a professional number cruncher, so this kind of thing is my cup of tea and probably not yours. I record it for posterity sake.

In 2013, I took just a bit fewer than 11,000 photos. That may sound like a lot, but it's about half of what I've done other years.

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 7,987 of which about 500 were uploaded in 2013. These photos have been viewed collectively 3,689,328 times with about 1,400,000 views in 2012. During the year, Flickr changed what's considered a "view" making more things count than what used to. As a number cruncher, this irritates me. (By comparison, last year I had about 1/3 as many views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 2455, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 13,984 unique visitors who made 37,336 visits viewing a total of 216,860 page views with 426,779 total hits. The most popular time to visit is 6 AM on Wednesdays. 573 visitors stayed for over an hour. (I suppose these are my biggest fans.) My desire is for the website to grow exponentially, and the more content that gets added, the more visits I should get every year. The goal is for the ads on the site to start paying off someday as well as the increased exposure causing me to be the first person found when looking for a stock photo of a specific place. I set up a Facebook account which now has 46 fans and a twitter feed with 31 followers. These were set up as a set-it-and-forget-it tools that re-post my other content, but still has room for growth.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. After four years, the hit counter says I've had 46,349 visitors with over 12,000 of those were in 2013. Blogger reports I had 143,954 page views in 4 years, with about 58,000 in 2013, a number which continues to grow. I even had 51 hits from the country of Poland.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good content is recordings of my dad's early music groups. All-time, I have 511,186 views with about 37,000 in 2012. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 35,622 views all-time, which is a number that somehow went down from last year. A new stat they offer: My videos have been watched for 74,515 minutes.